1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computers and, more particularly, to techniques for enabling e-mail routing and filtering based on dynamic identities.
2. Description of the Background Art
Some Internet sites and/or Internet service providers use identity management protocols, such as the protocols distributed under the trademarks CARDSPACE and OPEN ID, to electronically identify authorized users. CARDSPACE and OPEN ID allow users to provide their digital identities in a familiar, secure, and easy manner. In the physical world, we use business cards, credit cards and membership cards as forms of identification. Online, using identity management protocols, users can create a variety of virtual cards to electronically identify themselves to service providers. Each virtual card a user creates is also known as a separate “persona.”
A single user may have multiple personas. For example, a user may have a work persona, a personal persona, an Internet relay chat (irc) persona, a gaming persona, and the like. One reason personas are used is to limit information correlation between sites, groups of sites, or service providers. In other words, it is hard to connect the activities of a user who has a work persona having an e-mail address of BobSmith@abccompany.com and a gaming persona with a gaming screen name of “ClownOverlord.” Even though these personas are associated with the same person, as long as the user consistently uses each persona for work and gaming respectively, their identity should be more secure than if they used the same persona for each activity. While there may be a need for legal recourse to trace both personas to the same entity, for most interaction purposes the use of personas is accepted and justified. It should be understood that many service providers employ multiple internet sites and use these multiple sites to correlate user information. It can therefore be important to users to use different personas with various sites even though the sites may share data with the same service provider.
Identity systems known in the art or that may be developed in the future can assist a user in creating these different personas. In some identity systems, it may be possible for users to create site-specific or persona specific e-mail addresses, as part of their personas, in the hopes of keeping their real identity private. A site-specific e-mail address is an address that the user only provides to a particular site as part of their electronic identity. A persona-specific e-mail address is an address the user provides to multiple persons or sites based on the interests of the user. For example, a user can create a gambling persona e-mail account, such as moneymaker@abccompany.com, and provide this e-mail address only to persons and/or sites that are associated with user related gambling interests. The e-mail addresses may even be generated automatically for the user.
Once the user shares the e-mail with a site or service provider, it should be expected that the site or service provider will send e-mail to that particular e-mail address. When e-mail is received by a typical e-mail routing and filtering backend, the e-mail may be routed to some central location where the user can download and/or read the e-mail. Since these e-mail addresses might be automatically generated, users may distribute these addresses more freely than their primary e-mail address, feeling that the new e-mail addresses are less likely to receive SPAM than their primary e-mail address. Unfortunately, these e-mail addresses, like many e-mail addresses, are likely to attract SPAM regardless of how they were created. It should be understood that any received SPAM e-mails will likely become mixed together in the central inbox with legitimate e-mail messages, making it difficult and/or frustrating for the user to sift through their inbox. Other legitimate e-mails, having different contexts, may also become mixed together in the central location, again likely causing user frustration as they attempt to sort the e-mail by subject, topic, or other user preferred contexts.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus the routes and filters email based upon dynamic entities.